Culture

TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When the whole feed is taken together, it’s almost digital... See more

The problem is that audiences are not so easily fooled, because they have internalized the entirety of artistic progress in the 20th century. They know when a song is just a jam and not a radical piece of transformative art. But in working to find intellectual content, even where there is none, critics were able to justify their placement of non-in... See more

The passive engagement of ambient television is a boon for streaming services, which just want you to keep binging so that you feel your subscription is justified.

Netflix’s back catalogue of ambient options is made up of reality shows: “Dream Home Makeover” is ambient interior decorating; “Taco Chronicles,” ambient foodie travel; “Get Organized with the Home Edit,” ambient cleaning; “Street Food,” ambient cooking; “MeatEater,” ambient outdoorsmanship. What these shows all have in common is their placidity—th... See more

As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.

(With meditative tv) I don’t have to overthink much while watching, but I do have to pay attention, as though I were concentrating on repeating a mantra or focusing my breath. There’s no real emotional investment to make, and little to no connection to whatever problems are going on in the real world. 

What this points to is a critical change in the rhythms of everyday life which occur almost as collateral damage of the development in computation and their deployment in art and media. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre created the term ‘rhythmanalysis’ to discuss these processes. For him, to understand a society you had to analyse its rhythms ... See more

The sensation is one of wandering aimlessly, picking up and putting down partly-interesting objects with a sense of generalized indifference. I started noticing something else, too: the impulses powering my behavior weren’t even articulated. The reason for checking and scrolling was rarely in response to an actual inquiry.